Last night, Jonah Hill hosted Saturday Night Live, lending his comedy chops to some of this season’s funnier segments. One of the funny bits was his send up of himself and Hollywood egos. Hill, who received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the excellent serious film, Moneyball (2011), lets a camera crew follow him on the SNL set to illustrate that the nomination has not gone to his head.
The behind-the-scenes clip starts at the 1:45 mark, but you might also watch his monologue that introduces the clip starting from the beginning (well, except for a short commercial NBC makes you watch; if you are at work, turn down your speakers first). The video segment includes a funny exchange with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Kristen Wiig, and if you stay to the end, you will see two-time Oscar-winner Tom Hanks appear on the stage with his awards, “The Kick-Ass Twins.” [2014 Update: Unfortunately, the NBC video no longer works. FYI, If you are looking for Jonah Hill’s more recent appearance on SNL in January 2014, check out this link, which works as of today.] If your sense of humor prefers someone getting hit in the groin, the NBC website has a digital short from the show of Hill repeatedly getting hit by a tennis ball.
What did you think of Jonah Hill’s performance on Saturday Night Live this week? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Happy Daylight Savings Time! As you set your clocks an hour ahead, you might consider the history of the day as well as an appropriate song. On February 9, 1942, a law passed by Congress pushed ahead all U.S. clocks by one hour for the upcoming years. President Franklin Roosevelt advocated the year-round Daylight Savings Time, which was called “war time,” as a way to save fuel for the Allied war efforts. The law remained in effect until September 30, 1945 when Congress repealed it. A similar national law that turned back the clocks for seven months of the year had been in effect during World War I. But after both World War I and after World War II, the wars’ ends meant that states could once again regulate their own standard times.
Eventually, in 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act imposing a uniform standard for states to follow Daylight Savings Time, although allowing state legislatures to vote for an exemption. In the 1970s and 1980s Congress made additional changes to the law, including setting the time and date for when Daylight Savings Time begins. A 2005 law extended the Daylight Savings Time ending date from October to November, so now Daylight Savings Time begins at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March and ends at 2:00 a.m. on the first Sunday of November.
An appropriate song for Daylight Savings Time is the 1967 release “Time Has Come Today” by the Chambers Brothers.
The song has been covered by a number of people, including Joan Jett, the Ramones, and Steve Earle (with Sheryl Crow). The song seems to be loved by some great film directors. Hal Ashby used it in a key scene in Coming Home (1978); Brian De Palma used it in Casualties of War (1989); Oliver Stone used it in The Doors (1991); and Spike Lee used it in Crooklyn (1991). The song appears in several other films too, including Remember the Titans (2000), The Zodiac (2006) and many others according to Wikipedia.
In 2012, though, the use of the song was back in the news. Lester Chambers, the lead singer of the Chambers Brothers reached out to fans because he and the band often did not receive royalties for the use of their songs. Chambers explained that he is living on $1,200 a month and relying upon money from a musician’s charity when all he wants is what is rightly his. The campaign has attracted the support of Yoko Ono and others.
The law can change the clock, but can it turn back time to give justice to Lester Chambers? March 2013 Update: Through help from Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, Reddit, Kickstarter and attention through various media outlets, Lester Chambers — who had faced homelessness and health issues — began doing better and once again making music. He survived when someone attacked him during a performance in 2013 after he dedicated a song to Trayvon Martin. In 2014, Chambers was playing with Lester Chambers and the Mud Stompers. As of 2023, he continues to perform and was performing with Moonalice.
What do you think if Daylight Savings Time? What do you think of Lester Chambers’s campaign? Leave your two cents in the comments.
“This is your last chance, and I’m not talking about one of those Major League Baseball Steve Howe kind of last chances.” — Leslie Nielsen in Naked Gun 33 1⁄3 (1994)
Baseball pitcher Steve Howe was born more than fifty years ago this month on March 10, 1958 in Pontiac, Michigan. He died several years ago at the age of 48 by the side of the road when his pickup drifted off the road and overturned at 5:55 a.m. on April 28, 2006.
Howe had been one of the best pitchers in baseball, with highs such as winning Rookie of the Year in 1980 and saving the clinching game of the 1981 World Series for the Los Angeles Dodgers. But it was another kind of “high” that haunted his life, as drug addiction led him to be suspended from baseball multiple times. He was suspended for substance abuse problems seven times, including a “permanent” ban in 1992, although the ban was eventually overturned on appeal.
Howe dealt with addiction from a young age, and his cocaine use was his downfall in baseball. Many questioned how many chances one should get in baseball, leading to the above joke in Naked Gun 33 1/3.
Howe played for the Los Angeles Dodgers (1980–1983, 1985), the Minnesota Twins (1985), the Texas Rangers (1987), and ended his Major League Career with the New York Yankees (1991–1996). In the clip below, you can see a young Howe being introduced before the second game of the 1981 World Series at Yankee Stadium with the other Dodgers. It’s a moment of great success, even though the smiling Howe could not know that within a week he would win the fourth game of the series and be on the mound during the sixth game when his team became World Champions. (video starts at 5:05 where Howe is introduced.)
Howe also could not have known at that moment how drugs and suspensions would destroy his career. Despite his demons, though, he still had talent late in his career, serving as the Yankees’ closer in 1994 and earning 15 saves. But that was his last good year, and by June 1996 the Yankees released him. Two days after his release, authorities arrested him at the airport for having a loaded gun in his suitcase.
He tried for a comeback in 1997 playing with the Sioux Falls team of the independent Northern League. The comeback failed, and he ended up in Arizona owning an energy drink company. When he died, he was driving from Arizona to California to visit family.
I cannot help thinking of his last year playing baseball for the Sioux Falls Canaries. He must have known that his career was over and that his drug use had contributed to that. It already had been a few years since he was a Naked Gun joke. What kind of hope did he hold when he took the field in South Dakota night after night following his days wearing a Yankee uniform in New York City just a year earlier? During the next nine years before he was killed in a car crash did he look back on his time in Sioux Falls with regret or happy that he still tried?
As noted above, some argued that baseball gave him too many chances as it was. He had talent and opportunities that few get, so I understand the argument. But I wonder if we should impose limits on opportunities when life’s chances and opportunities always run out anyway. Life is cruel enough, so maybe we should not make it worse.
Howe played baseball for our amusement too, but by the time he had burned up his talent, fans and teams no longer needed him and he was left on his own. And, as U2 notes, “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own.” Sometimes you can’t make it with a little help either.
Do athletes get too many chances to make mistakes? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Today is International Women’s Day, and as we discussed in a post last year about Helen Reddy and “I Am Woman,” the day’s history goes back to 1911. Speaking of the special day, you may not know that a famous woman played a key part in the technology you likely are using right now to access the Internet. This week on CBS Sunday Morning, the show profiled a side activity of famous movie actress Hedy Lamarr. Although she was known for her beauty and her stardom, she had a room set aside to study engineering and work on ideas for new inventions. Richard Rhodes recently wrote about Lamarr and her roles in real life in Hedy’s Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.
One of Lamarr’s ideas later formed the basis for wi-fi technology. She had developed the idea as a way to help defend against German torpedoes as World War II approached. At the time, though, the Navy dismissed her idea and instead asked her to use her beauty instead of her brains to sell war bonds, which she did. If you only know her for her acting roles such as in Samson and Delilah (1949), or even if you only know her name from the references to her in Blazing Saddles (1974) by Harvey Korman’s character Hedley Lamarr.” (which prompted the real Lamarr to sue Mel Brooks), check out this story below.
The little-known hobby of the actress shows that Lamarr was more complicated than many knew at the time. While her beauty gave her a great career, fame, and money, one sees a touch of tragedy in her search for something more.
What is your favorite Hedy Lamarr film? Leave your two cents in the comments.
Robert Sherman, who with his brother Richard Sherman co-wrote numerous Walt Disney classics, has passed away at the age of 86. The Sherman brothers composed music for such films as Mary Poppins (1964), Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), The Jungle Book (1967), and other films. They also composed the oft-played, “It’s a Small World After All.” Among their many awards, the brothers received Academy Awards for the score of Mary Poppins and for the best song, which also was from that film, “Chim Chim Cher-ee.”
Richard’s brother Robert has explained that among their classic songs was Walt Disney’s favorite song, “Feed the Birds” from Mary Poppins.
It is a beautiful song that is unusual for a children’s movie. The song is not about dancing and happy animated creatures, but instead it is about a poor (homeless?) woman taking care of birds. One commentator has argued that the scene has religious overtones about “stewardship” and “a responsibility on humanity to care for nature.” It’s an interesting argument that reflects on the pivotal role of the woman feeding the birds in contrast to the children’s capitalist father who balks at the children spending their money on bird feeding. Wikipedia recounts how when Walt Disney first heard the song, he recognized that it was the central meaning of the film about charity and caring for others.
As a child, I found the scene both scary and intriguing (the latter of which might have been from the mystery to my American ears about what Julie Andrews sang when she sang “tuppence a bag”). Speaking of caring for others, the woman who played the small part of the bird woman was Jane Darwell, who had played Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Disney coaxed her out of retirement to play the part in Mary Poppins, which was her last film and which had some similar themes to her role in The Grapes of Wrath. Not a bad message from her or the Sherman brothers. RIP. In their honor, be nice today.
